


Garibaldi Was Not Abducted By The Shadows

by pallasite



Series: Behind the Gloves [124]
Category: Babylon 5, Babylon 5 & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Canon Compliant, Department Sigma, Episode: s03e22 Z'ha'dum, Essays, Fix-It, Gen, Meta, Psi Corps, Shadows (Babylon 5) - Freeform, Trapdoor Problems, Worldbuilding, telepaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-12
Updated: 2018-06-12
Packaged: 2019-05-21 05:02:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14908850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pallasite/pseuds/pallasite
Summary: "But I saw it happen on-screen!"





	Garibaldi Was Not Abducted By The Shadows

**Author's Note:**

> The prologue of _Behind the Gloves_ is [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10153487) \- please read!
> 
> If you like _Behind the Gloves_ and would like to send me an email, I can be reached at counterintuitive at protonmail dot com. Do you have questions? Would you like to tell me what you like about this project? Email me!
> 
> I also have an [ask blog](https://behind-the-gloves.tumblr.com/), a [writing blog](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/pallasite-writes), and a "P3 life" Tumblr [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/p3-life) with funny anecdotes. :)

I wasn't planning on discussing these events until later in the project, but this came up in the comments to earlier chapters of _Behind the Gloves_ , so I might as well explain it here. (I will come back to these events later when I tell the story from Bester's point of view.)

A reader wrote:

_“There is one thing I don’t get about Garibaldi and Bester, and that’s the Shadows. A Shadow ship picked up Garibaldi outside of the station and his lifepod seems to have shadowtech. Now, if Bester has modified him, via the Shadows to find what the Shadows are planning, it doesn’t make sense.”_

Garibaldi and his fighter are reported to be missing when the Shadows leave. We never see the Shadows capturing him (though we do see Shadow ships on-screen) - we see him later returned in an unidentified craft, which ejects a lifepod containing him, and then self-destructs. Fandom _assumes_ the Shadows took him, but it’s never directly shown. And Garibaldi has no memory of what happened.

**In-universe:**

Bester was trying to get intelligence on what Edgars was up to - hard proof - and to stop the genocide/enslavement plot he suspected Edgars of orchestrating. He was also mostly acting on his own at this point, since the Shadows had infiltrated EarthGov and the director of the Corps (a mundane) was involved in that (and had even been selling telepath prisoners as “weapons components” to the Shadows). So while Bester had some allies in the Corps (e.g. there were some loyal folks still in Sigma - he tweaked Garibaldi at the Sigma base on Mars), he was operating under the radar of the Corps leadership.

If you don’t know who can be trusted, no one can be trusted.

Bester took advantage of the standoff with the Shadows to kidnap Garibaldi, tweak him, and use him as an unknowing infiltrator of Edgars’ inner circle.

Bester was never working with the Shadows. He was consistently working _against_ the Shadows, even though that meant he often had to work under the radar of the director of the Corps.

The Shadows were not involved (other than in helping Edgars make the deadly virus in the first place).

_**BUT I SAW IT HAPPEN ON-SCREEN!** _

**Out-of-universe:**

What you saw at the end of Season 3 - with the Shadow ships on-screen and all - was written as a “trapdoor” for Jerry Doyle in case he decided not to come back to the show. JMS built in trapdoors for every single character, in case actors left the show for one reason or another.

These casting issues - both actual and potential - messed up the storytelling here and there, for out-of-universe reasons (as we also see with Takashima, Talia, and other characters - more on this later in the project).

(See the pile of Usenet posts at the bottom for more on this.)

These posts, taken as a whole, 1) say explicitly over and over that he built in trapdoors for every character, because you never know when/if people are going to leave, and 2) imply a fluidity in the overall writing that could, and would, change with circumstances (both casting and otherwise). As JMS saw it, in my words, the "meta outcome" was always the same (in his analogy, "the Allies win WWII"), but how that played out could take any number of paths (e.g. who lives and who dies along the way).

The writing had to be fluid, because there was no way to write a five-year plot arc in advance and be able to stick to everything as planned in an actual show.

Many things in the show were shown or mentioned on-screen and then later were changed/fixed, from corrections to dates (e.g. the date of the _Icarus_ expedition, which is wrong in the show and corrected in the Psi Corps books and the Technomage books) to whole plotlines appearing or disappearing when a trapdoor was triggered or someone returned (e.g. Lyta being written out and then unexpectedly coming back, Kosh having Talia's memories copied for when she came back (though she didn't), etc.).

As there is absolutely nothing later in the show, or in the canon books, that indicates Garibaldi was taken by the Shadows, and quite a bit that shows a self-consistent, different story, _Behind the Gloves_ is telling that latter story. I explain the events at the end of Season 3, and the Shadow ships on screen, as "a trapdoor that was never triggered" and then was replaced with a different story - but not a change that was explicitly explained in the show itself because 1) **they couldn't undo what they'd shown on screen,** and 2) **they couldn't really be bothered in the show itself to explain what the Corps was up to and why.** This was always (in the intent of the authors at this time) supposed to be a "nefarious side plot" with no real on-screen explanation. Hence, they intentionally left vague much of the material related to the Corps, and when they later cleaned some more things up in the books, they did so in a haphazard fashion.

Hence, my book.

Also, as my book has a fundamentally different "center of gravity" than on-screen canon, what JMS calls "the same outcome" with just a different "path" often constitutes a _radically different_ outcome from the point of view of the characters I am focusing on. (JMS may be focused on "who wins WWII," but a soldier's mom cares about whether her son comes home. Her son's life or death isn't merely a "path" to the same "outcome" in her life.)

So yes, you saw Shadow ships on screen, but this got retconned out when the writers took a different path, one shown in more detail in Season 4 and discussed in the books. _Behind the Gloves_ will cover this material at length later. You'll get to see what was going on off-screen, Edgars' assassination... all of that good stuff.

tl;dr:

The Shadows never kidnapped Garibaldi.

If the Shadows had taken Garibaldi, they wouldn't have just randomly let him go without making him work for them - they would have done to him what they did to Morden and Anna Sheridan (and certain technomages in the books). And Morden and Anna Sheridan weren't people they randomly kidnapped - they both went to Z'Ha'Dum. (As did the technomages, iirc.) The Shadows don't just randomly fly around and grab people.

And if the Shadows had taken him, Bester would also know this, having gone through his mind pretty thoroughly.

\-----

Here's the promised pile of Usenet posts that each say (among other things) that JMS built in trapdoors for every single character, that the writing was fluid, and that things changed along the way.

http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-8018  
http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-16383  
http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-16634  
http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-19885  
http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-13634  
http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-8817  
http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-16648  
http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-13003  
http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-18461


End file.
